President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, the two men at the center of the ongoing debate over whether to raise the debt limit, both addressed the country on the topic tonight. And that’s where the similarities between the two speeches ended.

Obama was all cool reason – making a case for why passing the debt ceiling is necessary to keep the economy on firm footing and quoting the likes of Ronald Reagan and Thomas Jefferson to argue that compromise is part of being American.

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Boehner was all white hot passion – blasting President Obama for his “business as usual” approach to governing in Washington and repeatedly insisting that it was the president not the Congress who was standing in the way of debt limit deal.

President Obama made clear tonight that the debate over the debt ceiling is not left vs. right. It’s center vs. right. There was nothing remotely “left” in this speech, unless you count higher taxes for corporate jet owners and a few other populist bits.

David Nakamura: Obama changes tone in public debate over debt ceiling. I actually can’t boil the lovefest down to a quick excerpt, except perhaps this line which is its own paragraph: Obama smiled.

Let’s face it, there was nothing new in the speech (Wizbang has the full transcript by Obama, along with Boehner’s). Well, there was this bit

Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling -— a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.

Got that? Typical Obama condescension, essentially calling the American People stupid. For a man who has no executive experience and apparently hasn’t learned anything in his current job, a man with little business experience, a man who passed an $800 billion pork laden giveaway, a man who has added more debt in his short time than Bush did in 8 years, and a man who laughed about “shovel ready jobs not being shovel ready,” well, he shouldn’t be calling other people stupid.